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Now into its 13th year, this festival of more than 100 films and videotapes from more than 25 countries runs at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday, October 14, through Sunday, October 23. Single tickets are $2.50 for adults and children; a pass good for five films is $10. For more information call 929-5437. Saturday, October 15 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » FLICKERS 1 Cordell Barker’s Canadian The Cat Came Back and Chris Randall’s English Count Duckula: No Sax Please, We’re Egyptian are both animated shorts; Cohn Finbow’s English and live-action featurette Under the Bed is a spoof of horror films....

Imagine performance art framed and lit so beautifully that one thinks of Hitchcock’s best work. In How Beautiful Is the Princess Salome Tonight, an ongoing collaboration between Argentinean artist Claudia Vera and South African choreographer-performance artist Robyn Orlin, every nuance of light, gesture, sound, and prop has been planned and perfected. Even the piece’s most quotidian act, that of setting a table, seems fraught with danger: a hanging animal carcass conjures a deceased lover, and the turning off of an electric fan seems loathsome....

IMAGO Imago is just as magical. The four members of the company use masks and costumes to create illusions. Caterpillars, frogs, geckos, and nameless orbs inhabit the stage. Though Disney-style cuteness threatens at times, the company has such strong technical foundations that it creates real magic. As the grandfatherly man next to me said, it was “Pilobolus meets Mummenschanz meets Clown College.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This man was a professor emeritus of theater at Northwestern University, Bob Schneiderman, who knows all about illusion and magic....

JUMP FOR JOY Until now. Half a century later the show that was, the show that was meant to be, and the show that might be today combine in this Jump for Joy. Many of the old songs have been rescued from oblivion by Ellington experts Andrew Homzy and Bill Berry, who laboriously restored the original orchestrations from Ellington’s lead sheets (stored at the Smithsonian Institution), and by Richard Wang, a University of Illinois music professor who served as music consultant....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Scheduled to air on local cable television earlier this year, Wright’s video ran head-on into political problems at the Chicago Access channel offices. Because of the nudity and sexually explicit narrative in the tape, cable administrators decided they could not risk breaching FCC regulations or perturbing potential funders and audiences. Voices of Life did not air....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While it is true that Madonna is without question completely in control of all aspects of her career and most of her personal life, what is not true is that she used this piece of film to manipulate our feelings about her. Instead she used this to poke fun at her own ego, persona, and life-style....

The weekly Dame Myra Hess concerts at the Cultural Center have been around for so long–well over a decade–that we take them for granted. But in how many other North American cities can one regularly hear accomplished musical performances without having to pay? While any music lover who’s downtown during lunch hour on Wednesdays should make a habit of attending these concerts, I’m singling out this recital because (1) Mark Kroll is a first-rate, much-recorded harpsichord player and scholar; (2) harpsichord music sounds especially pleasing and authentic under the dome of Preston Bradley Hall; and (3) the program of Francois Couperin’s Sixth Suite followed by Bach’s French Suite in B Minor makes musicological sense: Bach wrote his suite as homage to Couperin, who was grand organist to Louis XIV, the author of a famous book on harpsichord playing techniques and composer of more than 230 pieces for the instrument, and a giant in his time unjustly overlooked today....

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK While audience appreciation is not necessarily the best gauge of quality–e.g. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera–there’s clearly something wrong with a version of The Hunting of the Snark that gets nary a laugh. Some kids may take to the show’s edgy hyperactivity, but the delicious verbal wit that makes the poem fun to read is hopelessly lost, partly because of inconsistent articulation by the actors but mostly because of the way Pickering (a very gifted actor here making his directorial debut) buries the verse under a ton of colorful but messy activity and visual effects that look like leftovers from Michael Maggio’s misshapen A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Pickering starred last season at the Goodman....

Five passions are attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach, corresponding to his five annual sets of church cantatas. Of these, two have been entirely lost, and the Saint Luke Passion bearing Bach’s name is the work of a Bach student or minor contemporary. This leaves only the Saint John and the Saint Matthew passions, which are two of the supreme glories of Western music. The tradition of reciting the various Gospel accounts of Christ’s passion and death during Holy Week goes back to the 4th century; in the 13th century, this was done in a chantlike style, which gradually became more elaborate and reflective of the musical styles of the day, culminating in the magnificent 18th-century Baroque passions of Bach....

Festooned with European prizes and an Academy Award nomination, this solid, well-acted humanist period drama–adapted by director Gianni Amelio and Vincenzo Cerami from a novel by Leonardo Sciascia–makes its points quietly but firmly. In Palermo, Sicily, in 1937, an accountant (Ennio Fantastichini) for the Fascist Confederation of Professionals and Artists, who was recently fired for embezzlement, cold-bloodedly murders his former boss, the accountant who replaced him, and his wife (after raping her)....

THE DUMB SHOW: A REAL LIVE FABLE SOCK MONKEYS This arc of growing up, with a nihilistic American twist, is the basis for Redmoon Theater’s The Dumb Show: A Real Live Fable. The fable is told in few words but with a great deal of spectacle. Redmoon has built a rickety proscenium arch and mounted a scroll of paper across the top. When the Cranker, a gangly man in whiteface (Grigory Khasin), turns his crank, it pulls another section of the scroll into view, on which are written the words of the fable....

Long respected for his work in the group Oregon–where his unexpected oboe, and later his bass clarinet, quickly became that quartet’s most identifiable sound–Paul McCandless has finally put together a working band for his own music. That his own music sometimes echoes Oregon’s will come as no surprise. But McCandless also draws upon the Pat Metheny Group and the late lamented Weather Report for inspiration, two other outfits that deserve credit for their fusion of American jazz with world rhythm....

After three attempts, Margaret Wilson is coming close to passing her high school equivalency exam. Under the tutelage of a series of instructors, she has narrowed her margin of failure to a slim six points. “I’m down to my writing skills,” she says, meaning a 200-word essay she has had trouble with. “I’ll pass next time.” She displays no sense of superiority toward her students. “It’s not because I’m smarter that I’m helping,” Wilson says....

Half Moon Saloon, 3925 N. Lincoln: Pony busted through the door, took one look around the place, and got hopping mad. She glared at her ranch hands, Goldberg and Lippy. They looked scared. “I want to see the proprietors,” Pony told the bartender, setting herself down on a cowhide-cotton bar stool. The bartender put a glass shaped like a boot in front of her and filled it with Sierra Nevada. “I’ll tell ’em you’re here,” he said....

For over two decades Zairiain singer-composer-bandleader Tabu Ley Rochereau has been a superstar in Africa–and, along with guitarist-bandleader Franco, is one of the two reigning masters of the soukous or Congolese music that has be come a mainstay of pan-African popular culture. Soukous is basically a romantic dance music in which a skipping, driving rhumbalike beat punctuated by staccato horn blasts forms a setting for the singer’s extended meditations on life and love, sung in Lingala or French....

Down under Navy Pier. Chicago Maritime Society divers pulled more than 100 artifacts off the bottom of the lake at Navy Pier during this summer’s Maritime Folk Festival, reports Chicago Maritime News (Summer 1988). Most were old soda-pop bottles. “A third of the recovered bottles were close to forty years old, reported diver Dave Milligan. ‘There were bottles from the Jackson Beverage Company, Wanzer and Bowman Dairy Companies, Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottles, and an original Orange Crush bottle, all in excellent condition,” said Milligan....

THE DINOSAUR PLAY I’d been scared, however, when I packed Will, six-year-old Daniel, and their mom into my car and headed up to Evanston. Daniel is a dinosaur data bank–I was sure this kid wasn’t going to be convinced about anything. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Dinosaurs are real big,” he told me before the lights went out. I looked around the tiny theater and tried to warm up to the reality of life-size human beings playing prehistoric monsters....

THE SUM OF US Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Sum of Us brilliantly exposes the difficulty of the father-son relationship, but in a very subtle way. Playwright David Stevens pushes this aspect of the play into the background, and puts in the foreground a simple bittersweet story about two men looking for love–men who just happen to be father and son. He further downplays the tension between the two men by giving them what seems to be an ideal father-son relationship....

Why Do Newspapers Fear This Woman? Forget crime, drugs, corruption, and those other themes that newspapers thunder against in their pages. The crusade closest to the owners’ hearts is the one against Sally Jackson, a state official who could cost Illinois papers a bundle of money. The Department of Employment Security maintains the trust fund out of which unemployment compensation is paid. The fund is nourished by unemployment taxes paid by employers....

Not to be missed in its too-short (though just extended) run, the Goodman Theatre’s Wings is a rare fusion of state-of-the-art technique and straight-from-the-heart feeling. With director Michael Maggio at the helm, this wizardly production convincingly creates the shifting inner world of its heroine, former stunt aerialist and stroke victim Emily Stilson. A recent second viewing convinced this writer of the brilliance of Jeffrey Lunden’s lyrical, sometimes mystical music and the gracefulness of Arthur Perlman’s libretto....